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The Dems Turn Nasty

At 7:00 A.M this morning Victor Davis Hanson made a perspicacious prediction:

Expect Obama/Biden to get a little desperate and resort to more and more negative campaigning....

In this cycle of the see-saw race, expect Obama to take a risk and go really negative as he falls into a gripey, cranky mode.

Boy was he right. The Dems acted as though they were in a race to prove him right.

First, as reported by CBS, here?s Joe Biden in Columbia, Missouri, this morning:

I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?

CBS reporter Ryan Corsaro asked, rhetorically I?m sure:

Was Joe Biden referring to Sarah Palin, a mother of a child with Down syndrome, when he made this comment?

CBS reports; you decide.

Obama, not to be outdone in the negative department, joined the race to the bottom in Lebanon, Virginia. Reports Politico:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin?s new ?change? mantra.

?You can put lipstick on a pig,? he said as the crowd cheered. ?It?s still a pig.?

As Politico?s Ben Smith observed, unnecessarily,

The crowd apparently took the ?lipstick? line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: ?lipstick.?

Obama can?t be so dumb as not to have known how his ?lipstick? reference would be received.

UPDATE

For much more on this slime/gaffe, including the reference to McCain as an ?old fish,? which I didn?t quote above because I missed the connection, see InstaPundit?s discussion and links here.

UPDATE II

Since I am one of the guilty ones Victor Davis Hanson mentions here, I will print his persuasive take on Obama?s fishy pig-latin:

In all the furor over the Obama ?pig? quote, commentators forgot to examine his entire attack:

?You can put lipstick on a pig. ?It?s still a pig.?

?You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It?s still gonna stink.?

When read in the entire context you can see what he seems to mean with his dual animate male/female references and why he probably evoked two metaphors: most would think that Obama is talking about both on the ticket and his anger how each has expropriated his change motif.

So in that sense he appears both to insult the 72-year old McCain as the ?old fish? that is still going to ?stink?, and to refer to Palin, who had famously evoked the metaphor of lipstick in a nationally televised address, as still the pig despite the lipstick.

The fact that he used two metaphors to attack the two, and used expressions referring both to age and Palin?s recent use of ?lipstick? don?t seem to be accidents and that?s why the cooing crowd got the old fish=McCain;lipsticked pig=Palin immediately.

Full post as published by Discriminations on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).